If you don’t set out a clear and packed agenda before ascending to power, to deliver on the receipt of a mandate at a general election, then you will be left with all barnacles and no boat.
Announcements of new infrastructure are met with a weary sigh and the expectation that they will arrive decades late and billions over budget. We are world leaders in this. Getting this fixed is not flashy, but slow, involved and detail oriented.
The squeamishness of our mainstream political right tells us everything we need to know about Britain’s failure to conserve itself.
People voted for change, but not change for the worse. So bring on the u-turns – then we might get going in a positive direction for the changes we actually want want.
Some voices on the right have tried to define Britishness by race or heritage, as if behaviour were secondary. This is a profound mistake. When Britishness is reduced to how someone looks, standards stop mattering. And when standards stop mattering, disorder follows.
The prospect of a hung parliament invites hard questions which the Liberal Democrats have avoided for too long – and any answer will alienate some of their voters.
Ulster Unionists need to convince the electorate they are a serious alternative and have a distinct offer: taking devolution seriously; stability, competence, and credibility; a confident, reforming unionism that makes a positive case for the Union.
Admiration for Hungary’s “success” tells us more about the audiences and commentators than it does about the country itself – it is Budapest as a Barthesian myth.
Conservatives should of course want to conserve the planet. But we need to remain down-to-earth about the limits of this country’s moral influence and the global impact that further cutting Britain’s carbon emissions will make.
Though Trump would like to see the transatlantic alliance dead, it is too strong for any one leader to destroy. Better to ally ourselves with the transatlantic majority in Congress, to make any attempt to seize Greenland harder.
Parties are far too in thrall to the temporary nature of polls that gauge those public attitudes. They don’t share my Fantasy Premier League patience or Singapore’s investing mantra.
His abandonment of Ukraine is shameful, his threats against Canada disgusting and his designs on Greenland might have been scripted by Putin, but he seems to have called Venezuela correctly and, in so doing made the world a slightly better place.
London is, I think, a successful city. But it is less successful because of Khan. And the Tories have to accept that we, too, are partly to blame for this depressing state of affairs.
There are always temptations for oppositions to back measures which make it harder for governments to do things. Yet such tactics must be treated with great care.
We should remind ourselves that Reform’s policies are all dictated down from the top – there is no democratic process. None of this suggests illegality but it certainly demonstrates the conflict of interest Reform faces.